CHAPTER V
THE FISHING PRIZE
That night, before we went to bed, the five of us sat on the riprap rocks in front of the cottages, and Jibby told all he knew about the land pirate and his treasure again, and we got up the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. We sat there and swatted mosquitoes and talked like good friends and Dutch uncles, and swore a cross-my-heart and hope-to-die oath to be faithful and true to the constitution and by-laws of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company. There wasn’t any constitution or any by-laws, but that did not matter—we swore to be true to them, anyhow, and maybe, sometime when we had time, we might get up some, if we thought we needed them.
But, when we had talked it all over and had come right down to facts, the only thing about the treasure that Jibby seemed to be real sure of was that the old negro Mose had been awful dead earnest. That old negro had been mortal sure there was treasure somewhere. He would have bet a million dollars on it. And that was what made Jibby think there must be some treasure hidden somewhere. There was no doubt that there had been a land pirate named John A. Murrell.
Talking it over together that way, we asked Jibby a million or two questions, and it came out that the old negro Mose had said that “Riverbank” was the key to where the treasure was hidden. There was no “Riverbank” on the map side of the map, but on the back of it the one word “Riverbank” was written, old Mose had said, and old Mose said his father had said that was the key. “You go whar Riverbank is, up the river whar black folks is free,” was what his father had said. Of course, that was away back when there were slaves, and Mose was a slave then, and so was his father.
The other thing Jibby had to go on was the pine tree—the signal pine that every friend of John A. Murrell and his pirates set out in the corner of the lot or yard or farm. The thing to do, Jibby said, was to find a lone pine tree, because that would be a sign and a signal and a symbol and a sort of trademark, showing that place had something to do with John A. Murrell. We tried to think of lone pines, but, just offhand, we couldn’t think of any that night. All we knew were planted in rows.
So there did not seem to be much to do but elect Wampus the Captain of the Land Pirate’s Treasure-Hunting and Exploration Company, and go to bed. We thought we would go up and down the river when we had time, and explore back into the country here and there, and look for lone pines, and, if we found one in the corner of a lot or farm, we would look for a likely treasure-hiding place.
Early the next morning, Parcell, who runs the boathouse down at town, came up with my sister May and a load of groceries and meat for everybody, and he brought my dog along. My dog is one of the bulliest dogs you ever saw, but along about April that year all the hair came off his back, and mother said he was an awful sight, so we let a man take him, to grow his hair back on. The man was a horse doctor and good at making hairless dogs hairy again, and he had fixed Rover up fine. And now he had sent him back.
I was tickled to see Rover again, and he was tickled to see me, and I guess my mother was almost as glad, because some pretty tough customers live in houseboats on the river, sometimes. Most of the houseboaters are all right, and are kind and nice, but some mean ones come floating down the river, and you can never tell what they’ll do. So a dog comes in handy, especially a good-sized dog like Rover.
The only thing I was sorry about was that Rover had come this particular day, because the next day I would have to tie him up and leave him at home, because it was the day of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize. You can’t have a dog along when you are fishing from a skiff for a prize. And Uncle Oscar’s Fishing Prize was one of the most important things of the whole summer, always.
The way of the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize was this: Every year, as long as we had been going up to the island, Wampus Smale’s Uncle Oscar had given a prize to the fellow who made the best fishing record on a certain day, and that day was Uncle Oscar’s birthday. That was why we fished for the prize on that day, and not on another day.
This Uncle Oscar just lived and breathed on the river, as you might say, and loved it, and he thought nobody fished enough or boated enough or swam enough or loved the big old river enough. That was the way he was. He almost wept when he told about the old days when the river was full of fish and the big old packets and logging steamers were as thick as mosquitoes, and great long log rafts used to float down with huts built on them, and camp-fires, and men pushing the long sweeps to steer them.
That was why, every year, he offered the fishing prize, but we boys got so we didn’t take much interest in it.
“He just gives it so Wampus can win it,” Skippy Root said to me this year. “He knows Wampus is the best fisher, and he knows Wampus is sure to win it.”
“Well,” I said, “ain’t you going to try for it? Fishing is luck, and sometime Wampus’s luck is going to go back on him.”
“Sure, I’m going to try,” Skippy said. “I’m going to try, but not because I’ve got a chance to win. I’m going to try because Uncle Oscar Smale is a bully fellow and he’d feel bad if we didn’t let on we were trying to win the prize he gives. But Wampus will win it, like he always does.”
I thought so, too, and so did Tad Willing. Wampus always won. But, when we saw the prize Wampus’s Uncle Oscar offered this year, we did wish we had a chance. It was a jointed fishing-rod, with a five-dollar reel, and it was a beauty.
So, a week or so before Uncle Oscar’s birthday, we were squatting on the shore of the river talking about things, and Jibby Jones came along and sat down beside us. We were talking about crawfish holes and where bees had their bee trees with the honey in them and all sorts of things, just as we happened to think of them. There was a yellow-jacket bee on a flower just in front of us, getting honey, and Skippy said he wished he knew where that bee’s bee tree was.
Jibby Jones leaned over until his big nose almost touched the bee.
“I can’t tell by this bee,” he said, “but by and by there will be a bee come along and I can tell you.”
Pretty soon the bee flew up and circled and went down and lit on a rock and walked around. Then it flew out over the river and back and zigzagged off. Then two or three other bees tried the flower for honey, and each time Jibby Jones put his nose close to it and said, “No; not this one.” After a while a bee lit on the flower that seemed to satisfy Jibby.
“Now I can tell you,” he said. “You watch this bee when it flies away.”
So we did. When it got enough honey, it flew into the air and made a bee-line off for somewhere. Jibby pulled a pocket compass out of his pants pocket.
“A bit west of south-west-by-west,” he said. “Any time you want to find that bee tree you start from here and go just west of south-west-by-west and you’ll find it. That bee was going home.”
“How did you know that one was going home and the others were not?” Wampus asked. “Was that a pilot bee?”
“Maybe it was,” said Jibby.
“Well, how did you know it was a pilot bee, then?” asked Skippy.
“Maybe I could smell the difference,” Jibby said. “I’ve got a lot of nose; it ought to be good for something.”
So we all laughed, but we didn’t know whether Jibby was fooling or in earnest. That was the way he was. Sometimes he fooled just for the fun of it, and sometimes he was in earnest. We could never quite make out which he was, but we had found out one thing—if we waited long enough and didn’t keep joshing him too much, he always ended up by telling us what the truth was. So now Wampus sort of laughed.
“Aw, quit!” he said. “You can’t smell like that; you can’t smell the difference between one kind of bee and another kind. Nobody can; I never heard such nonsense. I bet even my Uncle Oscar can’t, and he knows just about everything.”
“Has he got a nose like mine?” Jibby asked.
Well, Wampus couldn’t say he had, because nobody we knew had a nose like Jibby. There were no other noses like it. It was the biggest and thinnest nose anybody ever saw.
“No,” Wampus said, “Uncle Oscar’s nose is just a common nose.”
“And does he exercise it regular?” Jibby asked.
“What do you mean by ‘exercise it regular’?” Wampus asked.
“Why, exercise it right along,” said Jibby. “Like you exercise your arms and legs if you want to make them good for what they are good for. Or like you would exercise your eyes if you wanted them to be good at seeing things. Or your ears if you wanted them to be ’cute at hearing things. You know you can do that, don’t you?”
“How?” asked Skippy.
“Well, the Indians did it,” said Jibby. “They began when they were young, and they exercised their ears and their eyes, and soon they could hear the grass grow and see a hair as far as you can see a fishpole. You can exercise your nose the same way, can’t you?”
“Well, it sounds sort of reasonable,” said Tad Willing.
“Of course, it sounds reasonable,” Jibby said, as pleasant as could be. “Can you do this?”
He put his thumb against the side of his nose and pushed it until most of his nose lay flat against his left cheek; then he put his thumb on the other side of his nose and pushed until his nose lay flat against his right cheek. We all tried it, but we couldn’t do it. Wampus was the worst at it, because his nose is a pug and sticks up.
“You don’t exercise your noses, that’s why,” Jibby said. “I don’t blame you. It is no business of mine what you do with your noses. But I exercise mine and keep it limber and flexible. I get up every morning and push my nose all around my face, to keep it keen and lively. It would be mighty dangerous for me if I ever let my nose get stiff and hard.”
“Why would it?” Skippy wanted to know.
“Because it’s my jib sail,” Jibby said, as solemn as an owl. “If I got out in a big wind sometime, say near the edge of a big precipice, and the wind caught my nose, it might blow me over and dash me to pieces on the rocks below. I’ve got to watch out for that, with a nose like mine. I’ve got to keep my nose limber, so that if a big wind comes up I can furl my jib, or jibe it to port or starboard, to steer me away from the precipice.”
We didn’t say anything. We just looked at one another.
“I might be out in Arizona, or somewhere else, where the wind blows hard for months at a time,” Jibby went on, just as solemn as before, “and a nose like mine would be a nuisance. The wind would catch it on one side and whirl me around one way, and then it would catch it on the other side and whirl me around the other way, and I’d never be able to get anywhere if I didn’t keep my nose soft and flexible, so I could lay it back against my face and fasten it there with a strip of adhesive plaster.”
“Oh, boy!” Skippy said then, because that was almost too much.
“But,” Jibby went on, “you fellows don’t need to exercise your noses that way because they don’t amount to much as jibs, anyway.”
“I’ll say mine don’t,” said Wampus, touching his pug.
“No,” said Jibby seriously. “I’ve often felt sorry for you, Wampus; having a stub like that. But it’s a good nose for smelling with, if you train it right. It ought to be a quick smeller—a lot quicker than mine—because it is so short. Smells ought to get in quicker. The only trouble is that you don’t any of you know how to smell.”
“You don’t have to know how to smell things,” said Tad. “You just smell them, and that’s all there is to it; you can’t help smelling them.”
“Did you ever read James Latimer’s book called ‘Odors and How to Improve the Sense of Smell’?” Jibby asked.
“No,” we all said.
“Neither did I,” said Jibby. “I never even heard of it, because there isn’t any such book, but there might be. Maybe I’ll write one myself, sometime. The trouble with you fellows is that you don’t think about your noses. I do think about mine; I think a lot about it. I can’t help thinking about it, there’s such a lot of it.”
That was true, anyway.
“You fellows just go around smelling what happens to come to you to be smelled,” Jibby went on. “You can tell a violet from a fish by the smell of it, maybe, but you don’t exercise your smelling apparatus. Can you tell the difference between a channel catfish and a mud catfish when they are down under the water ten feet or so?”
“No, and nobody can. Nobody can even smell a fish when it is under water,” said Wampus. “Can you?”
“No matter!” said Jibby, sort of tossing his head. “What I say is that, if people trained their noses and exercised their smelling powers properly, they might smell smells that they don’t even imagine they can smell now. That stands to reason. There are dozens of kinds of violets, but the most that most people can tell when they smell a violet is that it is a violet. A botanist, that has trained his nose to smell violets and knows there are dozens of different kinds of violets, gets so, after a while, he can tell most of them from the others just by the smell. And it is that way with everything.”
“Well, what good does it do?” asked Skippy.
“Everything you know does some good,” said Jibby. “That’s what knowing things is for, to do us good. It is just the ‘little bit more’ that makes anything the ‘most’ instead of leaving it the ‘least.’”
“I guess that’s so,” I said. “It’s partly because Wampus knows a little bit more about fishing than we do that he wins the Uncle Oscar Fishing Prize every year.”
“You mean he can smell the fish when they are under water?” Jibby asked.
“Pshaw, no!” said Skippy. “That’s nonsense.”
“Is it?” Jibby asked, grinning a little.
“Well, if it isn’t,” said Skippy, “why don’t you go in for the Uncle Oscar Prize this year?”
“Oh, I oughtn’t to do that,” Jibby said. “It wouldn’t be fair. What if I could smell the fish when they are under water? I’d know where all the fish were and you fellows that belong on the island here wouldn’t have a chance. No, I’d better not compete for that prize; I’d win it sure.”
CHAPTER VI
THE PRIZE-WINNER
Well, we all laughed! It was a little too ridiculous, the solemn way in which Jibby said he would be sure to win the prize. We had all tried to win the prize, and we knew no one but Wampus could win it; he was just a natural-born fisher and couldn’t be beat.
“Oh, very well, then,” Jibby said, pretending to be offended. “Just for that I will try to win it, and I will win it. I’m sorry to take it away from Wampus, but I’ll have to do it.”
We all laughed again.
“I suppose,” Tad said to Jibby, “you’ll go right home and give your nose some extra exercise now, won’t you?”
“Well, if you see me doing queer things with the old jib, don’t be surprised,” Jibby said.
The next few days, though, we certainly began to be worried and to think there might be something in what Jibby had more than hinted to us. He did some mighty queer things, and we watched him do them. He would stand with his nose in the air and sniff. He would stand with his nose up and sniff four or five times, and then turn his head just an inch and sniff four or five times more, and then turn his head again and sniff again, and so on. Sometimes he would pull a blade of grass and sniff at one end of it and then turn it around and sniff at the other end, and keep this up five minutes at a time.
Then he began sniffing the old Mississippi River. He would lie in a skiff with his head over the edge and his nose close to the water and sniff. Then he would get on the seat and row a distance and lie down and sniff again. A few minutes later, we caught him with fish scales, sniffing them one after another—a bass scale and a perch scale and a piece of channel catfish skin and a piece of mud catfish tail, and so on. Then, while we watched him, he put them one at a time in a pail of water, and sniffed at the water. He kept changing them in the water, first one and then the other, and he sniffed each time. It seemed plain enough to us that he was giving his nose some good exercise.
About eleven o’clock, on the fishing-prize day, Wampus’s Uncle Oscar came up to the island. He brought the jointed fishing-rod and the reel with him, so we could see what the prize was going to be, and I got him off alone and asked him what he thought about noses. I asked him if he thought Jibby Jones could really smell fish when they were under water, and if a person could exercise a nose and get it so it could smell things other noses could not smell.
“Why, yes, George,” he said slowly. “I do think a nose can be trained quite a little if a person goes about it right. That stands to reason. But I don’t take any stock in this idea that a person can smell fish under water. Does Jibby say he can?”
“Well, no,” I had to admit. “He hasn’t said so out and out; he just hinted it, as you might say. I’ll tell you one thing, though: he’s got Wampus frightened. And there was the way he smelled that bee and knew it was the pilot bee.”
“What’s that?” Uncle Oscar asked. “Tell me about that.”
When I had told him, he laughed.
“You boys want to look out for your Jibby Jones,” he said. “He’s a bright one. He may look a little queer, but some of the brightest men in the world have been the queerest lookers; their looks were out of a rut and their brains were out of a rut, too. Tell me one thing, George; can Jibby see as well as he says he can smell?”
“No, of course not,” I said. “I mean, he sees things we don’t take the trouble to see, sometimes, but his eyes can’t see very far. That is why he has to wear glasses. He’s near-sighted.”
“Has to poke his nose pretty close into things to see them?” said Uncle Oscar. “If he wanted to see exactly how a bee looked, for instance, he would have to poke his nose almost into a bee, would he?”
“Yes, that’s so,” I said.
“Well, you notice this the next time you look at a bee,” said Uncle Oscar. “The part of a bee back of its wings—its abdomen—is striped. When a bee goes out for honey, it goes for two things—a square meal for itself and some honey or some pollen to take back to the hive. A bee is greedy, too; it stuffs itself while the chance is good. If you watch a bee, you’ll see that the longer it feeds, the bigger and longer its abdomen gets. Especially longer. As it fills up, the stripes get farther apart. That’s how Jibby ‘smelled’ that bee, George. He poked his nose close to it so his eyes could see it, and he saw that its abdomen was swelled and stretched as much as it could be. That meant that the bee was ready to call it a day’s work and go back to the hive. So your Jibby knew that when the bee left the flower it would probably make a ‘bee-line’ for home. And he was right. That’s how he ‘smelled’ that ‘pilot’ bee. It wasn’t a pilot bee, and he didn’t smell it. So you and Wampus want to look out for Jibby Jones. This bee business makes me think he’s going to win the prize, or thinks he is. He’s a mighty smart boy.”
The next time I saw Jibby, which was about half an hour after that, I asked him:
“Well, how’s the old smeller getting along, Jibby? Is it going to win the prize?”
“I’ll tell you, George,” Jibby said, “I have hopes. I don’t say I’ll win, but I’m trying.”
“It will be an awful thing if it is windy this afternoon and you have to adhesive your nose shut against your cheek, won’t it?” I laughed.
Jibby put his finger to his nose and wiggled his nose at me, and then we both laughed.
“I know how you smelled the pilot bee, Jibby,” I told him.
“Do you?” he said, and it did not seem to bother him at all. “Just see if you and Wampus can see how I smell out the best and biggest fish this afternoon.”
The afternoon turned out to be the best sort for fishing. It was cloudy, but not too cloudy, and a nice riffle on the water, but not too rough. The place Wampus’s Uncle Oscar picked out for the contest was the slough at the upper end of our island, and that meant we would have to fish from skiffs, which is about the best way, anyhow.
There was not much of a gathering to see the contest. You can’t get mothers to be very interested in such things, except to say, “Oh, how nice!” or, “Oh, I’m sorry!” after it is all over, and our fathers—all except Jibby’s—went down to town every day to work. So the audience was just Wampus’s Uncle Oscar and Jibby’s father. They walked up to the slough together while we were rowing up, and they sat on the bank and watched us fish. We each had a skiff.
When we got to the slough, Jibby was ahead, and he ran his skiff ashore and waited for us.
“I’m a butter-in at this game,” he said, “so you fellows go ahead and pick out your places first, and then I’ll take mine.”
I suppose we ought to have let Jibby have first choice, but we didn’t think of it. Wampus rowed to the place he liked best and let down his anchor rock, and then the rest of us got as close to him as Uncle Oscar’s rules allowed. One boat-length away from each other was the rule. The other rules were that every fish counted. The one of us that got the most fish, no matter what size, scored twenty-five. The one that got the one biggest fish scored another twenty-five. The one that got the biggest weight of fish, after they were cleaned and ready to cook, scored fifty. That made the most that could be scored one hundred. We were to fish from one o’clock until five o’clock that afternoon, and we all had lunch—sandwiches and apples and bananas and water—so we could eat whenever we wanted to. The only other rule was that it was all worm fishing; we had to use worms for bait.
As soon as Wampus got his boat settled, he baited up and put his line over, and we all hustled up and did the same thing. In a minute, almost, Wampus shouted:
“First fish!”
He had it, too. It was a good channel catfish, and when he unhooked it he held it up and shouted:
“Oh, you Jibby! Come on with your fishing!”
Jibby hadn’t rowed out from the shore yet. Now he backed his skiff out carefully and leaned over while he rowed with one oar, and sniffed at the water over the side of the boat. He rowed here and he rowed there, and then, all of a sudden, he backed water and plumped his rock overboard and anchored. He was about twenty-five feet from us.
“Well,” Wampus said, “maybe he didn’t smell fish there, but he picked out a good place. I thought some of fishing there myself.”
Jibby took his time. He shortened up the rope to his rock anchor, and he looked to see that his fishpole and line and hook were just as he wished them to be, and he took out a pocket rule and measured how deep his bobber was set, as if it had to be just right to a part of an inch. Then he put his line over very carefully and—whang!—the bobber went under like a flash.
“Jibby’s got one!” I shouted.
“Shut up!” Wampus said, sort of cross. “We can’t catch anything if you yell all the time.” So we kept quiet and watched Jibby and our own bobbers. He had a perch, and it was a big one, almost three pounds. Wampus opened his eyes some when he saw it, because a three-pound perch is a good-sized fish and might be good for twenty-five points if nobody got a bigger one. Just then Skippy pulled in a mud catfish about as big as his hand, so we all got busy fishing as hard as we knew how.
It was lovely up there in the slough. The big elms and maples hung over and were draped with vines, and some sweet flower was making the air sweet. There were a few mosquitoes, but we did not mind them much; we were used to them. Jibby’s father and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar sat on the bank and smoked and watched.
Well, in an hour or so Wampus was away ahead of Tad and Skippy and me, like he always was at fishing, but he was fishing hard and changing his bobber every few minutes, because Jibby Jones was three fish ahead of him.
“I guess he’s got a real nose for fish,” Wampus whispered to us. “He’s smelled out the best fishing-hole in this whole slough; that’s what he has. I wish I had gone there instead of here. I’m a better fisherman than he is, and I know it and you know it, and if he beats me it will just be his nose that does it.”
“Then I wish I had his kind of nose,” I said, for I was so far behind that I knew I could never catch up unless I caught a whale.
Just then a school of small perch must have come by, for Wampus caught four in succession. That cheered him up, but not for long, because Jibby kept right on catching. Now and then Jibby would pull a paper from his pocket and look at it, and take his pocket rule from his pocket and set his bobber different, and catch another fish.
By three o’clock in the afternoon the sun was pretty hot, and even Wampus said the fish had stopped biting right, but old Jibby kept right on pulling one out now and then. When one side of his boat didn’t give him any fish, he would try the other side, but first he always sniffed to see if the fish were down there. So, after Wampus had not caught any for about half an hour, he tried smelling for fish, too. He leaned over and sniffed at the water.
“Can’t smell a thing,” he said.
The funny thing was that, right along through the heat of the afternoon, when fishing is the worst, Jibby kept on pulling in a fish every now and then. He hadn’t caught so many more than Wampus when the fish were biting easy, but he had kept up with him, and now, that they were not biting for Wampus, Jibby forged right ahead.
“There’s no use talking, fellows,” Wampus said. “I’m convinced. Jibby can smell out the fish. He smelled out the best fishing-hole on this whole slough, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve got a chance yet, but I do wish I had a can of nice fresh lively worms.”
“Yours most all gone?” Skippy asked.
“No,” Wampus told him, “but they’re mighty withered, what I’ve got left. If I was a fish, I’d be ashamed to tackle such sick-looking worms.”
Just about then the fish began biting again, but it looked as if they had got together and decided to help Jibby beat Wampus. Old Jibby just pulled them in as fast as he could take them off his hook, and just before five o’clock he got something on his line that acted like a ton of brick. It was only a carp, but it was a ten-pound one, and Jibby was mighty careful, and got it into the boat.
“Aw, what’s the use!” Wampus said. “He’s got these fish trained.”
Then Uncle Oscar, over on the bank, stood up and shouted, “Time’s up, boys!”—and we knew Jibby had won. We didn’t know how far he had won until we counted up the fish, and weighed them after they were cleaned. Old Jibby had the biggest fish, and he had the most fish, and he had the most weight of cleaned fish; he had the whole one hundred points, and he could have thrown away twenty fish and still have had the hundred points. Wampus was mighty disgusted.
It wasn’t until after we were home again and the fish had been weighed, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had handed the prize rod and reel to Jibby, that he said to Jibby:
“Well, son, I’ve fished on this river a good many years, but you’ve taught me something to-day.”
“How to smell out fishing-holes?” Wampus wanted to know.
Uncle Oscar looked at Jibby and laughed.
“You tell them, Jibby,” he said. “Your father told me. Tell them how you smelled out the fish.”
Jibby took his nose in his fingers and wiggled it.
“About a week ago,” he said, “I happened to stick my old nose-jib in a book, and that was when I smelled out these fish. I thought perhaps I might want to try for the prize, and I heard that old Izaak Walton was a great fisherman, so I stuck my nose in his book and tried to smell out something. Izaak Walton was the father of anglers, you know, George.”
“I know,” I said, pretty cheap, because I had lent the book to Jibby, but had never read it, because it was all about English fish, and not about Mississippi River fish.
“Well,” Jibby said, “first, I asked Orpheus Cadwallader where the best fishing-holes were, up in the slough here, and how deep I ought to set my bobber for the different fish, and he told me. I thought he ought to know, because he is the caretaker here and the best fisherman I know. That’s why I went to the hole I did go to. Orpheus Cadwallader told me it was good.”
“That’s all right,” Skippy said, “but what did you smell out of that Izaak Walton book; that’s what we want to know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Jibby. “You know what I told you? I said it is just the ‘little bit more’ that makes anything the ‘most’? I knew I couldn’t fish against Wampus unless I had the ‘little bit more.’ So I went to the Izaak Walton book, and the only thing I found there that I didn’t know was scouring the worms.”
“Scouring the worms! What is that?” asked Wampus, opening his eyes pretty wide.
“Walton tells how, in his book,” said Jibby. “You dig your worms ahead of time, and put them in wet moss, in a box, and let them be there. Angleworms eat mud, you know, and they’re full of mud. If you put them in wet moss, they don’t have any mud to eat and they get clean and bright and husky. They get used to being wet, too. They get brighter in color. They don’t drown so quick when they are in the water, and they can wiggle harder and longer, and stay alive better, and the fish see them quicker and like them better.”
“Shucks!” said Wampus. “Was that it?”
“Sure, it was!” said Jibby. “I figured that your worms would wash out pale quicker than mine, and that by the middle of the afternoon they would be pretty sick worms, in a hot tin can, while mine, in a box of moss, would be cool and fresh and lively. And they were! It was as if I had live worms to fish with and you had dead ones.”
“And you got that out of a book that was written maybe a couple of hundred years ago?” I asked him.
“Sure, I did!” said Jibby. “I’ve got a nose that can smell common sense that far.”
Well, that beat us! That beat Wampus, too.
“You win!” he said. “You had us all fooled, Jibby. You deserve the prize. You’ve got a wonderful nose!”
So that was all there was to it. We all laughed, and Jibby laughed, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar laughed. Then, all of a sudden, Wampus’s Uncle Oscar put his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Um-yum!” he said. “I’ve got a fine nose, too. I can smell fish frying, and it certainly smells good to me. Can you smell it, Jibby?”
Jibby put his nose in the air and sniffed.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I can smell three channel catfish and four perch.”
Then he sniffed again.
“Two of the catfish are fried on one side, and the other catfish and the four perch are fried on the other side,” he said.
And that’s how Jibby was; he was a dandy. He liked to fool, but there was always something back of his fooling. This time it was a fried fish supper. So we went to wash up and have it, for we were all eating at Wampus’s house. And while Wampus was washing, he turned to Jibby and said:
“Well, Jibby, if your nose can smell out things so extra well, why don’t you give it a little more exercise and then smell out that land pirate’s treasure?”
“Maybe I will, Wampus, if you say to. You’re the Captain and the orders have to come from you,” Jibby said.
But none of us knew then how soon we were going to be a lot more excited about that land pirate’s treasure.
CHAPTER VII
THE TOUGH CUSTOMER
Well, we all had a good time at dinner, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar made a speech and gave Jibby Jones the rod and reel, and Jibby made us laugh by saying we mustn’t blame him for winning the prize, because it wasn’t his fault he had an extra good nose; he said it was his Grandfather Parmenter’s fault, that he had inherited the nose from. Then Wampus’s Uncle Oscar said that it was all right to say “nose,” but that the kind of “nose” Jibby used was brains, and that—on the river or off the river—the fellow that had brains and used them always stood the best chance of winning.
So we ate fried fish until we couldn’t eat any more, and then we sat around outside until bedtime, and I tied Rover to one of the posts under our cottage, and we all went home and to bed.
Maybe I had eaten too much fried fish. Anyway, I lay awake awhile and heard Orpheus Cadwallader waddling past the house, going his rounds to see that everything was all right, and I heard Rover get up and walk to the end of his rope and wag his tail at Orpheus. His tail thumped against one of the posts, and I knew he was wagging it.
A little while later, Rover began to howl, and he is one of the loudest howlers in the world, I guess. The moon was one of the things he was fondest of howling at; he seemed to think it was hung in the sky as an insult to dogs. Whenever there was a moon and Rover saw it, he howled. And the other thing that made him howl was being tied up. He would stand being tied up for an hour or so, because he expected I would come and untie him, but, if he was tied for much longer than an hour, he felt hurt and miserable and neglected, and he would begin to howl. He would begin with an “Arr-oo———” and hang on to the “oo” until it quivered and trembled, and everybody within a mile wondered if it was ever going to stop, and got nervous, and tossed in bed, and swore. And then Rover would take another breath and begin another “Arr-oo———” longer and louder than ever. And keep it up all night, unless somebody went and untied him.
The reason I tied Rover that night was because he is a wandering dog. He likes to explore. And what he likes to explore for is dead fish, mostly, and the deader the better. If you didn’t tie him up at night, he would wander off until he found a dead fish, and then he would roll in it. The deader the fish was, the better he liked it; he thought it was perfumery, I guess. He would wander for miles around our island, and even swim across the slough to Oak Island and wander there, hunting a dead fish to perfume himself with. And he was such an affectionate and loving dog, and so proud of himself when he was all perfumed up, that mother and the rest of us just hated him when he was that way.
If I had known Rover was coming up that day, I would have gone around the shore of our island and the shore of Oak Island and got rid of all the dead fish, but Rover’s coming was a surprise, and we had had the fishing-prize contest that day, so all there was to do was to tie him up and let him howl. His howling was pretty bad, but it wasn’t as bad as dead fish, which is about the worst thing there is.
Well, after Orpheus Cadwallader passed our cottage again, going back, I turned over on my stomach and hoped I’d go to sleep, and I expected Rover would have a fine all-night howl, but all of a sudden he stopped howling and began to bark. It was his angry “Woof! woof!” bark, with a mean snarl at the end, which meant somebody was around who had no business to be around.
I sat up in bed, and I could feel the old cottage joggle as Rover jerked at his rope, and then, suddenly, the rope broke and off Rover went, barking to beat the band, full tilt toward the slough back of our cottages. About halfway there, I should judge, he came up with what had set him to barking. I heard a rough voice say, “Get away from here! Get away from here!” and a club thumping on Rover’s back, and more barking, and swearing, and then Rover yipped, and began to scream—if you can call it that—the way a dog does when it is hurt, or has its paw run over by a wagon, or breaks a toe.
In a second I was out of bed and getting into my clothes, and I heard Rover come yipping and whining back toward the cottage. I did not have many clothes to put on, and in a couple of seconds I was downstairs, and by the time I was out there and Rover was whining at my feet, Wampus and his Uncle Oscar and Skippy and Tad and Jibby were out there, too, and we heard Orph Cadwallader coming running as fast as such a fat man could.
Orph had his shotgun, and Wampus’s Uncle Oscar had a pistol, and Jibby had brought along an electric torch. We looked at Rover’s foot and saw it was hurt pretty bad, and that one of his ears was cut where it had been hit, and we were all pretty mad. Nobody had a right to be on our island but us, and most of the time nobody was there but the women and us kids and Orph Cadwallader, and tramps had no business there. They were too dangerous.
So Wampus’s Uncle Oscar took the electric torch from Jibby and said:
“You boys stay back here; this is a man’s job. Orph and I will attend to this!”
So the five of us, Jibby and Wampus and Tad and Skippy and I, we went along with Orph and Wampus’s uncle. I held the piece of rope that was tied around Rover’s neck, and he limped along, whining. We made quite a procession, and when we looked back we could see that all the cottages were lighted up. Everybody was out of bed. You couldn’t expect us to stay back when there was so much excitement.
We went through the woods and, before we had gone very far, the light from the electric torch picked out two men who were standing waist-deep in the stinging nettles under the trees, waiting for us to come up to them. It was easy to guess that they had started away from where Rover had met them, and that they had then heard us and stopped. And that was not like river-rats or tramps who had come to snoop around and steal what they could and then get away again. That kind come in skiffs, and, if you see them, they scoot for their skiffs and row away as fast as they can. But these men waited for us.
“What’s this mean? What you doing on this island? What you hurt this dog for?” Wampus’s Uncle Oscar asked when we came up to the men.
They were river-rats, all right, or tramps, or toughs of some kind; you could tell that by their looks. And one was the toughest-looking customer I ever did see! He had only one eye and that was an ugly one—keen and wicked-looking. His right hand had only two fingers and a thumb, and there were three deep scars across his face. He had a regular pirate’s bunch of black whiskers, and all he needed was a red sash with a couple of pistols stuck in it, and a cutlass, and a red handkerchief tied around his head, and a pair of brass rings in his ears, to look like a real pirate. And when he moved out from the nettles we saw he had one wooden leg—scarred and chipped as if he had used it to break rocks.
His mate, the other man, was smaller and meaner-looking, if anybody could look meaner. He looked like a rat—sneaky-looking. We called him the Rat when we talked about him afterward. So when Wampus’s uncle shouted at them, they looked at us.
“That’s all right, boss; that’s all right!” the Tough Customer said. “No harm meant. Pardner and I don’t mean no harm. We didn’t know anybody was on this island. We wouldn’t do no harm.”
“What did you try to kill that dog for, then?” Wampus’s uncle asked, and no fooling, either.
“Well, he come at us, boss,” the Tough Customer said. “We was just walking through here and the dog come at us. So I took a swipe at him with a club. Anybody would, boss, when a dog comes at him that way.”
“Well, you look here!” Wampus’s uncle said. “This is a private island, owned by folks, and nobody is allowed on it. And no nonsense about it, either. You get off, and you stay off, or you’re liable to get shot, or worse. You get off this island now, and you stay off it hereafter.”
“Yes, sure, boss!” the Tough Customer said. “We’ll do that; we don’t mean no harm; we wouldn’t touch anything, anyhow.”
And that might have been all right, but just then something went “Arr-awk—arr-awk!”—and anybody would have known it was a chicken. Orpheus Cadwallader made about five steps, and grabbed the Rat, and stuck his hand into the Rat’s shirt, and, sure enough, in the back of the Rat’s shirt was one of Orpheus’s own chickens. It gave a flop of its wings and scooted for its coop, making big flying leaps and scolding as it went. So Orph made a swipe at the Rat with the end of his gun, but the Rat dodged, and then turned and ran as hard as his legs could carry him. Orph let fly with both barrels of his shotgun, but there were too many trees; he did not even pepper the Rat.
“So!” said Wampus’s uncle. “That’s the idea, is it? Well, we’ll just see you off the island right here and now. Where’s your boat?”
The Tough Customer looked at the pistol Wampus’s uncle carried, and I guess he decided that Wampus’s uncle wouldn’t shoot a man in the back, not unless he ran, anyway, and he turned and stumped off toward the bank of the slough until he came to the path, and then he turned down the path a hundred yards, and all of us following him.
There was a place there where the arum and pickerel weed came close to the shore, but the water was two or three feet deep, and tied to a tree there was a shanty-boat—one of the smallest and worst old shanty-boats I ever saw. It did not look over ten feet long, and it wasn’t more than five feet wide, with not a window in it, and the deck not over two feet wide. The boards of which it was made were thin and old and warped, and the only power was a ten-foot pole with a board nailed on one end.
When he came to the shanty-boat, the Tough Customer stopped to untie his shore line and threw it aboard. He did not say another word. He took his ten-foot pole from the roof of the shanty-boat and braced it against the shore and pushed, and the boat slithered among the weeds and glided out from the shore.
We stood and watched until the shanty-boat was out in the middle of the slough, where the current caught it and swung it slowly downstream. Then the Tough Customer rested and looked toward us, and swore at us strong and steady for a long while, and Wampus’s uncle said it was all over, and we went home. I looked Rover’s paw and ear over, and saw they were not so bad, so I tied him up again and went to bed. Of course, mother asked all about what had happened, and said she had been frightened when she heard the gunshots, but she was glad everything was all right and the tramps were off the island.
The next morning there was only one thing for me to do if I wanted to have mother let me keep Rover on the Island, and that was to explore for dead fish and get them out of the way. So we all went—all five of us boys. We went down the chute side of the island first, but we didn’t find a single dead fish, because all the folks know about Rover, and they don’t leave any dead dogfish or other kinds on shore when they catch them. So we got as far as the end of the island, downstream, and started along up the slough side of the island, and all of a sudden Wampus stopped short.
“Look there,” he said, bending down and pointing. “There’s that Tough Customer’s shanty-boat. He didn’t quit the island. He only floated down and landed lower down.”
We all bent low and saw the shanty-boat. It was in a sort of small cove, where the willows must have hid it from the slough, and I don’t suppose anybody could have seen it from the island except from the very spot where we were.
“Come on!” I whispered. “Let’s go and get Orph and your Uncle Oscar, and tell them.”
But Jibby Jones put out a hand and held me back.
“This doesn’t look right,” he said, shaking his head. “This looks evil to me. Those men were told to get off the island, and they said they would get off the island, and there’s no honest reason why they should be on the island. All they had to do when they were out in the slough last night was to let their shanty-boat drift and they would have gone on down past here. They must mean some devilment on the island, and we ought to know what it is.”
Well, that seemed reasonable, and Jibby said what we must do. We must crawl up through the willows and investigate. The only trouble was Rover. I couldn’t tie him to a tree because he would howl, and, if I dragged him through the willows, he would see the shanty-boat and bark, and, if I turned him loose, he would probably jump all around and go to the shanty-boat and scare the Tough Customer and the Rat into fits. But Jibby fixed that. He said the thing for me to do was to take Rover and go back and get Orph Cadwallader and Wampus’s uncle. So I went.
Jibby and the boys crawled as close to the shanty-boat as they could, Indian fashion, and lay in the willows, and they were in luck, because the Tough Customer and the Rat were talking.
“No, sir!” the Tough Customer was saying. “I don’t stay on any island where caretakers go around with shotguns, shooting them off any time of the day or night.”
“I don’t see that you’ve got any kick to make about shotguns,” the Rat said, in his whining voice. “I’m the one that got shot at.”
“I don’t care who got shot at,” the Tough Customer said. “Four or five barrels of cider wouldn’t pay me for getting my hide full of birdshot, not if it was the hardest cider on earth. And you don’t know that they hid the cider on this island—you only think so. It may be on any island in the whole river. You just forget that cider, pardner, and let’s get to hunting that treasure I know about.”
“Well, it ain’t playing me square,” the Rat whined. “A bargain is a bargain, and the bargain was that, if I paid my money and bought this shanty-boat, you would help me find that cider first, and help me get away with it and sell it. And I as good as know it was on this island them barrels of cider was hid. And, if so, on this island is where we want to be.”
“And get shot full of birdshot or, maybe, buckshot,” sneered the Tough Customer. “Why, man alive! just now after these island folks is all roused up is no time to hunt around on this island for a few pesky barrels of cider. They’ll all be carrying shotguns for the next month or so. No, sir! Now is the time to stay away from this island. We can come back later on if you want to, but now is the time to be hunting that land pirate’s treasure.”
“You don’t know how much it is, and you don’t know where it is, and you don’t even know if there is any,” complained the Rat.
“All right!” said the Tough Customer. “Maybe I know more than you think I do. Maybe I ain’t told you all I know yet. Maybe I thought I would just wait and see if you was a reasonable cuss and willing to do the wise thing, or if you was a sort of idiot that would want to hang around an island and get shot full of buckshot and bullets for a few barrels of no-account cider. How about that?”
“’Tain’t right! ’Tain’t right!” the Rat complained. “Pardners ought to be fair and square and tell all. Next thing you’ll be saying you won’t split half and half.”
“Half and half was what I said, and half and half holds good,” said the Tough Customer. “And this will, maybe, be a big thing. I’ll play fair with you if you play fair with me. Will you play fair? Hope to die and may your throat be cut, if you don’t?”
“Hope to die and may my throat be cut if I don’t!” said the Rat. “Fair and square, or may the dogs eat us!”
“Now, that’s talking,” said the Tough Customer. “Look here, now!”
They heard him feeling around among the boards of the shanty-boat, inside and nearest the corner to the boys.
“I got a map of the whole business,” the Tough Customer said. “You didn’t know that, did you? It’s been right there in that split board back of the lantern ever since I come aboard this boat. And you would never have seen it if you hadn’t played fair and square with me, you bet! Gimme that board there to spread it out on.”
They heard the Rat move around and then the Tough Customer spoke again.
“When I was down there in Helena, like I told you,” he said, “they stuck me in jail for ten days for being a vagrant, and there was a fellow in my cell with me, see? A red-headed fellow with a scar over one eye. And he shines up to me about the second day, and says I’m the sort of man he’s looking for. He says he knows where pirate’s treasure is, and he’s getting up a gang to go and get it. Only, he’s in jail for three months for stealing a hog, you understand? And he needs somebody that’s going to be free soon, to make some preparations and one thing and another. So he shows me this map that he stole off an old nigger down there.”